The dildo probed a little deeper and resumed its steady movement. The hand began rubbing his neck more firmly, as if to provide a distraction from the increasing pain. Ian’s eyes darted from side to side but, so close to the pillow, could see nothing. He could feel his heartbeat thumping against the mattress and a sudden spurt of adrenaline reignited his earlier feelings of pleasure. He tried to push himself up, but the hand on his neck forced him down, kept his face firmly into the sheets. Just as the sense of panic threatened to overwhelm him, the dildo slid out of him. The trapped wind made a farting noise, and they both laughed. The pressure on his neck was also released, and he felt a gentle kiss descend behind his left ear. Relaxing back into the sheets, he closed his eyes and waited for his heart rate to slow.
‘Don’t worry.’ Another kiss. ‘If that dildo is too much for you, I have something else.’
‘Just be gentle,’ he murmured. From deep in the pillow, he could see that the bedside clock read 1.05 a.m. He had to be at work in just over four hours so this time he really did have to get some sleep. ‘It’s late, and maybe we’ve had enough for tonight,’ he said, sounding as casual as possible. ‘We can do this again some other time. I need to get some rest now, but you can stay if you want to.’
‘That’s OK.’ He felt the mattress shift and heard the sound of bare feet padding across the thin carpet. ‘I will have to get going, but, first, I’ve got something to round the night off nicely.’
Whatever. Having called time, Ian had already moved on in his mind, and was thinking about the people that he had to meet in the morning. They were Chileans, dealers in ‘specialist’ technology, and very nice clients. Happily, they were also undemanding types, which would be just as well on this particular occasion.
He was just dreaming about demolishing a full English breakfast when he felt a sharp, burning pain explode through his abdomen. ‘What?’ he cried, his eyes welling up before he could even open them. This time, the flesh was definitely tearing. There was another blow before he could throw off the pillow and flip over on to his back. The sheets beneath him were turning red. Then he saw the blade, dripping with blood, his blood, being waved in front of his face. I should scream, he thought as he watched the knife scything through his cheek, extending his mouth all the way to his left ear. Help! his brain screamed, but all that came out was a gurgle.
A series of blows rained down on his face, neck and torso. Even as he was bringing his arms up to his head in a futile attempt to defend himself, he was mesmerised by the weapon. It was almost as if it was working on its own. Once, twice, three times, he tried to grab it, simply attracting gashes to his hands and arms. Grabbing a pillow, he tried to hide from the attack, but a swift knee to the balls sent him sprawling. As he fell off the bed, his head bounced off a side table and he landed on the floor.
Dazed, he tried to curl up into a ball but found himself being dragged back on to the bed. Maybe he cried for his mother; or maybe he just imagined that he did. For what seemed like an eternity, the blows kept descending. Even the repeated moaning, as metal penetrated flesh, and the occasional grunt of his assailant could not drown out the whirr of the air-conditioning.
As he drifted out of consciousness for the last time, Ian could not believe his bad luck.
FIVE
Yorkshire, June 1984
‘Sit still, sunshine. This is going to hurt.’ The voice was tired, bored, provincial. Not friendly, not interested.
Fresh out of Hendon training college, Constable John Carlyle felt a long way from home.
‘You’ll feel just a little sting. Move around and it will get worse.’
‘Shit!’ Carlyle screwed up his face and closed his eyes tightly. The sweat trickled down his forehead from beneath his recently refreshed number-one buzz cut, mingling with the TCP liquid antiseptic that had just been rubbed into the gash above his right eye. Although barely two inches long, it felt massive and deep, and Carlyle could feel it opening and closing as he wiggled his eyebrows. He was sure that his skull was now exposed to the elements. Maybe my brain will slip out, he thought. Assuming that he still had one.
‘Sit still! Surely you London boys can take a bit of rough-and-tumble, can’t you?’ The pasty paramedic, dressed in a green jumpsuit, his gargoyle face looking washed out in the glare of the intense sunlight, stood back to admire his work. He pronounced himself satisfied, then quickly slapped a plaster the size of a cigarette packet on Carlyle’s forehead.
‘You’re done,’ he said.
Carlyle opened one eye. ‘It hurts.’
‘I told you it would.’ The gargoyle took a quick swig from the TCP bottle, swilled it around his mouth and spat it on the ground. He offered to share a taste. Carlyle shook his head and looked away. Wiping more sweat from his forehead, he felt the heat rising from his face and felt the snot desiccating and solidifying in his nose. This was not where he wanted to be, stuck in the middle of a row of terraced houses in the middle of some hapless, downtrodden, down-at-heel village in the middle of the north of England.
Even the weather was wrong. In the middle of his dark mood, summer had finally arrived, exploding on the scene in all its glory. What little breeze there had been earlier had vanished. The sky was a deep blue of infinite promise, suggesting long summer holidays, vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce on top, and deckchairs on Brighton beach. Across the street, a radio began blasting out ‘Electric Avenue’ by Eddy Grant. Think long enough and hard enough, Carlyle told himself, and maybe you could think yourself somewhere else. Maybe… but not for very long.
According to the weather forecast, it was supposed to reach thirty-one degrees this afternoon. Sitting here in the sun, it felt a whole lot hotter. Inside the various layers of his riot gear, it was probably well above 40 degrees, possibly even 45. Up since 4 a.m., he had spent four hours sitting on a bus, and then more than six hours standing around in the sun, with the PSU (the Police Support Unit, the riot squad) ranged in front of him, and the mounted officers lined up behind. Their horses were ready to go into action at the sound of the Commander’s whistle, bolting towards the strikers whether Carlyle and his colleagues got out of their way in time or not.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Fucking waiting.
Nothing to do but stand around, with only the occasional hurled insult and the promise of a ruck offering some diversion.
This was nothing new. More than three hundred police officers bussed in from around the country had been living in a hangar on the airbase at RAF Syerston for almost a week now. Syerston was an hour down the road, in Nottinghamshire, where only twenty per cent of mineworkers were on strike. Here in Yorkshire, where Carlyle was currently pressed into service, the figure was more than ninety-seven per cent. That meant dozens of pitched battles up and down the county; and thousands of arrests. The working day consisted of fourteen-hour shifts, with the rest of the time divided into six hours’ sleep and four hours of wishing you were either working or sleeping.
Apart from the minor head injury, today was a fairly standard day. Peeling his tongue off the floor of his mouth, Carlyle tried to swallow. His head throbbed viciously, nastier than any bastard hangover he had yet managed to inflict on himself during his first two decades on the planet. Behind the pain, ‘I Fought the Law’ by The Clash was playing on a continuous loop deep within the mush of his brain. Under different circumstances, the irony would have made him smile. Now he just wished that Joe Strummer, Mick Jones et al. would kindly shut the fuck up and get out of his head.
Carlyle looked up at the gargoyle. ‘Got any aspirin?’
The paramedic grunted and tossed him a small foil-covered tray of pills pulled from his pocket. Carlyle popped two, and then another two, shoving the remainder into the inside pocket of his overalls. He grabbed a bottle of water from the low wall on which he was sitting, and took a cautious sip. His throat felt raw and it didn’t feel as if the pills would stay down. He felt the aspirin fighting their way back up, and swallowed hard.
‘Will I need stitches?’ Carlyle asked hopefully. Naturally squeamish at the best of times, he wasn’t a big fan of hospitals, but a couple of hours spent in one this afternoon would do nicely. He was in the market for some sympathy, and some hands-on care from a nubile nurse would go down a treat.
‘You’ll be fine,’ the gargoyle said, as he stripped off his rubber gloves and groped for the packet of cigarettes
